"In this country, we talk too much about public health and health care separately," said Dr. Paul Ramsey, dean of the UW School of Medicine. "What we should be talking about is how we can best improve health."

"Global health means global, which includes us," Wahl said. She said the new UW Department of Global Health's mission to decompartmentalize and broaden efforts to solve health problems would be a campuswide initiative that includes experts from many fields -- law, sociology, education, anthropology and so forth.

Today, before the UW Board of Regents, Wahl and Ramsey plan to present officially the proposal for the new department and seek formal approval to move forward with it.

The plan to create a global-health department became public last year when the Gates Foundation gave $10 million in seed money. The Seattle philanthropy, the world's largest with global health as its primary mission, announced Wednesday that it was donating $20 million more to the new UW department.

The UW is still conducting an international search for director of the new program, which will have headquarters at its satellite campus on South Lake Union.

Dr. Larry Corey, an AIDS expert and director of an international HIV vaccine research initiative based in Seattle but run for the National Institutes of Health, is the only publicly declared candidate for the new position. Another AIDS researcher, Dr. Thomas Quinn at Johns Hopkins University, withdrew his candidacy last fall.

The UW is already a recognized leader in many aspects of global health. The UW's Dr. King Holmes, for example, a world-renowned expert in infectious disease with joint appointments in both medicine and public health, began working in Africa in the 1960s.

"This new department will build on that," Ramsey said.

The idea, he said, is for the UW to become a focal point for the many efforts already under way in Seattle -- many of them fired up with new money from Gates -- that appear to be transforming this region into one of the leading centers for solving problems in global health.